Vascular insufficiency, secondary to occlusive processes in the vasculature, constitutes a disease phenotype of wide applicability in a number of common disease states including among others: coronary insufficiency, cerebrovascular insufficiency, peripheral vascular insufficiency and impaired kidney perfusion. Among the major known pre-disposing factors causing narrowing of vasculature are: 1) elevated serum cholesterol, 2) elevated serum triglycerides, 3) elevated serum glucose, 4) elevated serum homocysteine, 5) certain inflammatory processes and 6) hypertension.
Ketone bodies cannot be utilized by liver, hence they can not be used to synthesize either triglycerides or cholesterol. Triglycerides and cholesterol are synthesized either from carbohydrates or lipids, which provide acetyl CoA, and thence respectively malonyl CoA or HMG CoA for the two synthetic pathways. The major source of blood cholesterol and triglyceride comes from liver where it is excreted into the blood as VLDL, the fatty acids of which are removed by various tissues to leave LDL in the blood.
The inventors of the subject patent application have found that feeding a subject a diet comprising, in part, esters or oligomers of the ketone body D-β-hydroxybutyrate and lowered dietary fat can reverse a number of the known predisposing factors leading to vascular diseases.